Mushrooms are all around us. We see them on lawns, in fields, on trees, and on the forest floor. They are everywhere, yet they are still poorly understood. Scientists estimate that 1.5 million species exist, but only about 100 000 of these have been described. Mushrooms used to be categorized as plants. However, they are too different from plants to fit in the same category. Today they are ranked as a kingdom like animals and plants. Unlike plants, mushrooms cannot synthesize their own food from the sun's energy. They have no chlorophyll. They cannot use sunlight to form sugars from the water and carbon dioxide in the air like plants. Through an extensive network called the mycelium, a mass of threadlike hyphae below the ground or within another substrate, they absorb nutrients from their environment.

The Fly Agaric Store

Illusion, Magic, and Room for Vision are photographs of one of the most beautiful mushrooms called the fly-agaric (amanita muscaria), der Fliegenpilz (German), la fausse oronge or le tue-mouches (French), or the mukhomor (Russian). This is a hallucinogenic toadstool (see FDA / CFSAN Bad Bug Book Mushroom toxins), popular in myths and fairy tales, and very colorful. It has a flaming red cap with white spots.

Mushrooms live in their food. They have developed special methods of living - saprophytism, symbiosis, and parasitism - to survive. Saprophytism is a method used by species which grow on lawns, on rotting wood or on excrement. These mushrooms feed themselves by decomposing and digesting the organic matter. They return nutrients to the soil and release carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere at the same time.

Most of the mushrooms growing on the forest floor are linked to trees by symbiosis. Some mushrooms are parasites. There are different kinds of parasites, ranging from those that attack a healthy host and live on it without killing it, to those that only attack unhealthy hosts, thereby speeding up their death. The parasitic species are mostly microscopic mushrooms.

Until medieval times, mushrooms were primarily used as drugs besides being used as food. Today mushrooms are still alive in fairy tales and alternative life styles. In medicine, they have been replaced by products that contain their active substances in a purified form. These substances are increasingly produced biotechnologically or biosynthesized. Beneficial findings, especially from those undescribed species, await discovery by modern science.

Agarics, also known as "gilled mushrooms", are one of the most familiar types of mushrooms. They range from the deadly Destroying angel to the familiar white mushroom, from the hallucinogenic Fly agaric to the bioluminescent Jack-O-Lantern mushroom. The term mushroom is applied to any visible fungus. It is used to refer to what we see above ground, the fruiting body which produces the spores, the spore producing structure.The main difference between spores and seeds is that spores have very little stored food resources compared with seeds, and require more favorable conditions in order to flourish. In compensation, spores are very tough and can survive for years in dry conditions.